What will our city, country and world look like in a decade? Or 50-years from now?
Those are questions many of us have considered, especially if we are the age to have children and grandchildren who will be around as the future unfolds.
In a rural community we often hear it said that farmers are essentially just caretakers of the land, working to ensure it remains productive for the generations which follow.
That is largely the role we all play in our local community, in our country, and our little mud ball of a planet circling the sun.
What we do today can have ripples well into the future.
That is a motivating factor for many. There is a desire to do things which make for a better future.
In the past, the City of Yorkton has held discussions with people in the community, building a profile of what the collective vision of our city should be moving forward. That process is now well in our past, and likely something that could use some freshening as the vision of our future will change as we arrive closer to the point our plan set as a benchmark.
That process of looking to our future was brought into focus during the Yorkton Film Festival last week.
On the one hand the very existence of the long-running festival suggests sometimes things just happen as a result of time moving on. It’s a sure bet the first people sitting around a table in 1947 setting plans for the first festival in 1950 were not daydreaming it would still be held in 2018 as the longest running film festival in North America.
But through the years, the good and the bad, organizers have kept the event alive through change and adaptation so that it is now part of our history, the current fabric of our community, and is likely to continue evolving into the future.
And then there is the television series "We Are Canada" which was awarded the Golden Sheaf for Documentary Series.
"We Are Canada" celebrates the next generation of change-makers whose works are shaping and defining our future in imaginative ways, explained series creator and co-executive producer Ken Dryden.
Dryden might be best known as a former National Hockey League goaltender with Montreal and as a Hockey Hall of Fame inductee. He was on hand for both a screening of the first episode of the series and awards night. He told those attending the screening the idea for the series arose out of Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017.
Such anniversaries are generally a time of reflection on the history of a country, said Dryden, but he saw it as an opportunity to look forward as well at “what we can be.”
The questions became simple: “What kind of Canada do they want? What kind of world do they want to live in?”
Dryden said we have an opportunity to “not be a passenger to the future.” It is a chance to be “a driver,” he added.
It’s a natural idea, offered Dryden.
“You want what you do to have an effect on those who come after,” he said.
And therein is a little truth we should all keep at the forefront of our thinking. What we do today as individuals becomes part of the collective future we all have a role in creating, just like the film festival founders and those who helped build a community framework for Yorkton.
